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It can be challenging for people when they learn an idea at a conference and try to apply it in their work environment. Fanny Pittack and Alex Schwartz practiced a “change dojo” with conference attendants and provided suggestions to do successful change in organizations. InfoQ interviewed them about using change dojos for organizational change.

“An agile enterprise is able to anticipate and respond swiftly to changes in the marketplace” says Scott Ambler. InfQ interviewed Scott about the reasons why agile projects are failing, how to increase budgets for building new systems, disciplined DevOps, harmonizing agile and lean, and on coaching for enterprise agility.

When people work together in agile teams, emotions are bound to happen. Where positive emotions can give a boost to team working, negative emotions can have significant impact on collaboration in teams and affect their productivity. Noel Radley published a report on how team mood can impact project management. InfoQ asked her why negative emotions happen and how agile teams can deal with them.

InfoQ is researching the factors that influence the mood of teams. As team mood is an aggregation of the individual moods of team members, understanding the individual mood and how it influences team working can help to learn more about team moods. InfoQ interviewed Gerald Weinberg about individual and team mood, influencing the mood of individuals and discussing moods in teams.

In lean, we co-design and continuously improve processes and tools to better serve individuals and interactions said Claudio Perrone. Lean views problems as a gap between the current situation and the standard and expectation. Am interview with Claudio about problem solving and learning, and on tools that can be used to apply lean thinking for change in organizations.

Teams can share their experiences with other teams and coaches through storytelling. Agile coaches can facilitate a process of sharing experiences to empower teams and help them becoming self-organized said Patrick Steyaert and Wim Bollen. They showed a technique based upon archetype construction to draw learning’s from team stories which teams can use to design and travel their own agile journey.

Agile coaches often use a “hands-off” descriptive approach when coaching teams. The question is if such a coaching approach is always the best solution when teams are adopting agile? Would there be situations where prescriptive “hands-on” coaching could be more effective? How could you do it?

Worldwide Agile Coach Camps continue to allow coaching practitioners to share knowledge and experience with a view to improving outcomes for agile teams across many countries and industries. This post lists upcoming Coach Camps, looks at how and why they work and discusses their impact with participants.

Organizations can work with agile coaches for the adoption of agile. Coaches use conversations to support people in the organization to change their way of working. Which practices do you use in agile coaching conversations?

Agile teams use retrospectives to reflect upon their way of working. Since it’s the team’s own responsibility to continuously improve themselves they have to decide upon the actions that they will do. What can managers do to support their teams when they are doing agile retrospectives?

When adopting agile teams can use (external) coaches and mentors. But teams can also develop themselves by having team members mentoring and coaching each other. Team members can learn skills and abilities from other team members in multidisciplinary teams, enabling the team to grow as a whole and become self-organized.

Agile coaches can coach in pairs instead of coaching individually. Each coach will focus on different aspects of coaching. As every coach has specific experience and skills they can complement each other. Two coaches can collaboratively help individuals or teams to learn and improve when adopting agile.

Working in an agile team can sometimes be stressful, when the needs of the customers are unclear, if there is a lot of work to be done, or when team members are having difficulties doing their work. You might ask the question if having fun could reduce the feelings of stress, increase motivation, or increase productivity? And if that is true, then what can you do to have more fun in agile teams?

Maurizio Pedriale & Alan Hortz facilitated a workshop at the Agile Tour Brussels conference where multiple teams played 4 exercises with Lego. The purpose of the exercises is to get a first understanding of the Cynefin framework, and discuss how to use it agile coaching situations.

Two video lessons covering agile coaching and organizational change were released by Pearson/Addison-Wesley in the last quarter of 2012. They provide a different way to increase knowledge on agile adoption for visual and audible learners.